Amateur archaeologist decodes 20,000-year-old cave drawings across Europe, study says
Ancient cave drawings, like animal figures and handprints, are generally thought to have meanings, but the specifics of these millennia-old shapes have long eluded experts. An amateur archaeologist set out to change that in a study.
Bennett Bacon, a researcher and furniture conservator in London, took an interest in cave art drawings, BBC reported. “The meaning of the markings within these drawings has always intrigued me so I set about trying to decode them,” Bacon said in a Thursday, Jan. 5, news release from University College London.
Spending hours at the library and searching for photos of cave art online, Bacon collected “as much data as possible and began looking for repeating patterns,” he explained in the UCL release.
As Bacon’s ideas progressed, he reached out to academics to collaborate with him. The result? A “proto-writing system” over 10,000 years older than the earliest cuneiform writing from Sumeria, Bacon and co-authors write in a study published Jan. 5 by Cambridge University Press.
The researchers focused on three abstract symbols — a dot, line and Y-shaped symbol — repeatedly found near animal figures in 20,000-year-old cave drawings from across Europe, the study said. Bacon and his team hypothesized that the symbols were part of a notational system used to mark important biological events of the animals depicted nearby.
These markings, however, would only make sense with a reference point consistent and obvious to people 20,000 years ago, the study said. The team hypothesized the markings were one-month units within a calendar that began in spring, after the snow and ice melted.
To test this hypothesis, Bacon and his collaborations collected over 800 examples of these symbols from European caves throughout the Paleolithic time period. The researchers compared the cave drawings to data on seasonal animal behavior in a statistical analysis.
The findings supported Bacon’s hypothesis, suggesting the dots and lines were not random but correlated with the mating or birthing seasons of the animals depicted nearby, the study said.
“The study shows that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were the first to use a systematic calendar and marks to record information about major ecological events within that calendar,” one of the study’s collaborators, Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at Durham University, said in the news release.
For Bacon, the findings had even more significance. “As we probe deeper into their world, what we are discovering is that these ancient ancestors are a lot more like us than we had previously thought,” he said. “These people, separated from us by many millennia, are suddenly a lot closer.”
Look inside the tomb of ‘the midwife of Jesus’ as Israel plans to open cave to public
Vandals destroy 30,000-year-old finger paintings in Australian cave. ‘Irreparable’
A refugee hid a box of coins in an Israeli cave 2,200 years ago. It was just found
